Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) powers web-scraping and proxy networks for thousands of data-driven teams.
For years, marketing owned traffic to the site—but had zero control inside the product. Every banner, pop-up or feature call-out queued behind the dashboard team’s sprints. That disconnect meant the most engaged users—already logged-in customers—rarely saw new launches until weeks (or months) after release.
When Senior Product Marketing Manager Gabrielė Verbickaite, surveyed users, one answer kept returning:
“We just go to your dashboard for news.”
If the dashboard was the primary news channel, marketing needed a way to speak there—without stealing dev cycles.
“Anything that had to do with our dashboard had to go through the dashboard team,” Gabrielė recalls. “For marketing we didn’t have any option to just put up a banner or point users somewhere.”
Even minor tweaks waited “three sprints or something like that”—the polite death of urgency. With launch cycles stretched, campaign ideas piled up, un-tested and un-shipped.
Building an internal banner system would burn the very resources they lacked: developer hours. Instead, the team piloted Candu, a drag-and-drop editor that lets non-technical teams inject React components directly into the dashboard.
“Initially we were just looking into banners, but the fun part is we didn’t even start with banners—hotspots shipped first!”
Statistics Hotspot – Their first Candu project highlighted live usage stats. A two-state design grabbed attention on the first visit,* then shrank to a subtle blue toggle so power users weren’t annoyed.
"Latest in Smartproxy” Feed – A product-update timeline that marketing maintains like a social feed. Customers now scroll releases the way they scroll LinkedIn.
Product Info Pages – Interactive, in-app explanations replace static docs and push 61 % of visitors to engage deeply.
Targeted Banners & Slide-outs – Free-trial promos, GiB ➡ GB migration notices, downtime alerts—all launched in minutes, not sprints.
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In February the team launched free trials across products. Traditional channels under-performed, so they tested an in-app banner focused only on Mobile Proxies. Result:
Least-adopted product ➜ Top trial choice (52 % of all trials) with a 15.8 % CTR.
“Never in my life would I have expected that we’d get requests from product to put up banners, but now it happens all the time.”
With results undeniable and no dev lift required, product managers ask marketing to handle downtime notices and feature roll-outs. Demand grew so quickly the team is onboarding PMs directly into Candu to self-serve. This mirrors what other companies like Moz experienced when their marketing team took ownership of product onboarding.
Gabrielė’s advice: “Be prepared for the unexpected; one small banner can snowball into so much more.”
Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, is a premium proxy and web scraping solution provider, offering a range of residential proxies, datacenter proxies, and specialized scraping APIs for businesses of all sizes.
Candu is a no-code editor that enables marketing and product teams to create and modify in-app experiences without engineering support. With Candu, teams can build product tours, onboarding guides, feature announcements, and in-app messaging that drive user activation and adoption while reducing time-to-market for new initiatives.
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